Ilana Mercer, January 8, 2010

Late last year, the supremely smug South African Justice Richard Goldstone was interviewed by the singularity boring Fareed Zakaria of CNN. The occasion was the release of Goldstone’s brick-thick report on “Operation Cast Lead Gaza” (December 27 to January 18), undertaken for the UN Human Rights Council. By Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment, Goldstone saw to it that Israel was “morally hanged, drawn and quartered and given an unfair trial to boot.”

The trial lawyer, Goldstone, had petitioned the UNHRC for the coveted gig. According to the Hudson Institute’s “Eye on the UN” project, “Goldstone has been on the short-list to be UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, but has never made it.”

For a Jew seeking admission into the inner sanctum of the UN school of scoundrels, there is no better Baptism by fire than hanging, drawing and quartering Israel, that proverbial Jew among nations. Except that in Goldstone’s case the pleasure was all his.

And Hamas’s. Musa Abu Marzouq, Hamas’ second-in-command, gloated over a report that convicted Israel and generally “exonerated Hamas from any misconduct.” In an interview, Marzouq said the following:

[T]he report exonerates Hamas from the accusation of using civilians as human shields and attributes this accusation to Israeli forces. Likewise, the report exonerated Hamas from all other accusations mentioned by Israel, and even when the report is dealing with the rockets which were launched from Gaza, it speaks about military groups without naming Hamas.”

“Between Goldstone and Gaza, what’s one more zero?” mulled commentator Martin Kramer, who discovered “at least one order-of-magnitude error” regarding some of Goldstone’s very basic statistics. For example: Goldstone wrote that “324 factories had been destroyed during the Israeli military operations at a cost of 40,000 jobs.” “The Palestinian Federation of Industries puts the job losses at these 324 factories not at 40,000, but at 4,000.” True, this is cold comfort for the jobless. But you daren’t distort data to drive home a point.

“Five hundred and seventy five pages of NGO ‘cut and paste,'” was the verdict of “NGO Monitor”: “In its analysis of NGO submissions and testimony, NGO Monitor found numerous false and unsubstantiated allegations. Nevertheless, the Goldstone committee [which relied almost entirely on ‘NGO statements, publications and submissions’] simply copied the NGO biases, flawed methodology and false claims, rendering the entire report invalid.”

The report is primarily based on NGO statements, publications, and submissions (70 references each for “B’Tselem” and the “Palestinian Center for Human Rights,” and more than 30 for Al-Haq and “Human Rights Watch”).

Perplexed over the Goldstone accusation of “actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity” was Shimon Peres, Israel’s mild-mannered president:

Out of the 26 suggestions that the [Goldstone] Commission made, none deal with how to fight terrorism. … The Goldstone Commission Report says that the Palestinians have the right ‘to forceful resistance based on the right of self-determination.’ What is ‘the right to forceful resistance?’ To fire on civilians?

He may be many things, but stupid Alan Dershowitz is not. The Harvard law professor reckons that Judge Goldstone “dodged an intellectual confrontation with him and chose “to speak with relatively less incisive interviewers.” Zakaria fits the bill. Blessed with a generous overbite, but not much brains, the gormless journalist extracted this scoop: “They [the Israelis] destroyed most of the egg production. They killed tens of thousands of chickens.”

The Huffington Post covered Goldstone’s penchant for perverting international law. During the peak period of his popularity, “Goldstone had made serious ethical breaches in his capacity as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY). The HuffPo failed to pursue the man far enough into that past.

When introducing Goldstone, Zakaria described the judge as having made his name, among other acts of greatness, in pursuing an end to the political violence that came with apartheid in his home country of South Africa.

Ostracized for his convictions, this writer’s father ─ Rabbi Ben Isaacson ─ was a leading anti-apartheid activist. Goldstone had no such history of protest, father assures me. The roaming Judge attached himself like a limpet mine to the anti-apartheid cause only once it became fashionable, safe and professionally expedient.

Goldstone’s Wiki biography corroborates father’s recollection. The Judge joined the cause du jour in “the latter years of Apartheid in South Africa.” Goldstone’s “courageous” judicial decisions in the cause of freedom, moreover, comported with what South Africa’s Western system of Dutch-Roman law provided ─ a system currently being replaced, by the African National Congress, with a blend of tribal and totalitarian laws.

To this expatriate South African, the most anodyne assertion Goldstone made to zombie Zakaria was this one:

We had [in South Africa] an impossible situation and a certainty that we were going to have bloodbath, and because we had good leadership it was averted, and we now have, I’m proud to say, a working, wonderful democracy.

Since he helped put the finishing touches on the “wonderful South African democracy,” upward of 300,000 innocents have been murdered. The democratic, savage South Africa is now the most deadly country in the world. Goldstone might want to look in his own plate before he passes judgment on (an admittedly imperfect) Israel.

Richard Goldstone began his celebrity career by helping to demote a lesser evil (the Afrikaner National Party) and promote the quintessential evil (Mandela’s African National Congress).